The invention relates to transcribing ideographic characters, particularly Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language characters so they may be classified, indexed and rewritten. According to one aspect the invention relates to a typewriter for writing any or all of the approximately fifty-thousand existing Chinese language characters, as well as any yet to be created, with a simple keyboard.
The Chinese language and other oriental languages are written in some fifty-thousand or so characters that comprise a number of strokes of varying sizes and positions within each character. This method of writing contrasts with other written languages such as English or other European alphabetic languages which employ alphabets having a small number of digits or letters. Numbers of such letters of similar size are assembled and arranged in specific order within each word and follow each other sequentially in one specific direction such as left to right across the page. This sequence and directional arrangement of a small number of letters permits classifying the words on the basis of the letters' conventional locations in the alphabet, that is alphabetically. As a result, alphabetically written languages are amenable to type setting, typewriting, telegraphy, and/sorting through assembly and disassembly of the letters. On the other hand Chinese language characters are not readily disassembled or reassembled. Thus, until now no means have been found to obtain commensurate advantages for the Chinese language and its characters. The Chinese language for example uses a telegraphic code that consists of arbitrary dot and dash combinations, namely the international Morse Code for the Numbers 0 through 9,999 for less than the 10,000 of the almost 50,000 characters in the Chinese language. Moreover, Chinese language texts, even important reference works, newspapers and periodicals, are indexed inadequately if at all. The efficient use of modern data processing techniques has been substantially blocked by this problem. Attempts to remedy this situation have depended upon the application or modification of traditional analytic classification systems.